Discriminant Metric Learning Approach for Face Verification

In this study, we propose a distance metric learning approach called discriminant metric learning (DML) for face verification, which addresses a binary-class problem for classifying whether or not two input images are of the same subject. The critical issue for solving this problem is determining the method to be used for measuring the distance between two images. Among various methods, the large margin nearest neighbor (LMNN) method is a state-of-the-art algorithm. However, to compensate the LMNN's entangled data distribution due to high levels of appearance variations in unconstrained environments, DML's goal is to penalize violations of the negative pair distance relationship, i.e., the images with different labels, while being integrated with LMNN to model the distance relation between positive pairs, i.e., the images with the same label. The likelihoods of the input images, estimated using DML and LMNN metrics, are then weighted and combined for further analysis. Additionally, rather than using the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classification mechanism, we propose a verification mechanism that measures the correlation of the class label distribution of neighbors to reduce the false negative rate of positive pairs. From the experimental results, we see that DML can modify the relation of negative pairs in the original LMNN space and compensate for LMNN's performance on faces with large variances, such as pose and expression.